Obama’s Big Bet on Karzai in Afghanistan

My latest Capital Journal column looks at how much of President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan depends on his Afghan counterpart:

President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy represents a significant gamble, the success of which will turn on two key assumptions about the main characters in the Afghan drama:

The first assumption is that President Hamid Karzai can be made stronger than is often supposed. The second is that the Taliban enemy is weaker than is often imagined.

Both propositions underlie Mr. Obama’s calculation that a surge of 30,000 new American troops can be both mounted quickly and ended quickly. The most controversial part of that strategy is Mr. Obama’s decision to set a two-year timetable for pulling out those additional American troops he is sending to Afghanistan.

The American military has long resisted hard and public timetables for ending military missions, on the assumption that a deadline merely lets the bad guys know how long they have to wait out American troops before moving in. That precise criticism was immediately heard from Republicans.

Mr. Obama, in a lunch at the White House with a few columnists hours before he delivered his nationally televised speech on Afghanistan policy, countered that in this case the deadline for an American withdrawal is crucial to create leverage on Mr. Karzai to move with real urgency to improve his government and its security forces so they can take over the task of fighting the Taliban.